COMELEC considers postponing May 2016 elections

(SPOT.PH) The Supreme Court ordered the Commission on Elections on March 9 to issue receipts to voters on voting day, and now the latter is looking into moving the date of the elections due to technical concerns. But Commission on Elections (COMELEC) Chairman Andres Bautista acknowledges that to postpone the May elections would require legislation, according to a report on Inquirer.net.

“Unless otherwise provided by law, the elections will be held on the second Monday of May,” he said.

Bautista informed the crowd in a press conference held on March 9 that an evaluation of the election timetable is needed. The poll body also plans to file a motion for reconsideration, and will ask to be allowed to hold a demo of the vote counting machines.

“What we actually want is a chance for us to demonstrate our machines to the Supreme Court (SC) so that the justices can see for themselves how it operates, its features, and the reasons why we believe that it will be complicated or on how the disadvantages will outweigh the advantages of printing voter receipts,” Bautista expressed.

To implement the decision of the SC, the COMELEC would need to reconfigure over 92,500 SD memory cards, retrain over 277,000 election inspectors, and execute a variety of other tasks that printing the voter receipt would require.

According to Bautista, printing a voter receipt in a clustered precinct that has 600 voters would take a minute, which could add up to 10 more hours of voting time. If precincts open at 7 a.m. on May 9, the additional hours would mean extending voting time until 5 a.m. the next day.